Why I Call It “Bringing Out the Best At Work”

In the early 1970s I was a graduate student at The Wright Institute. were I was the second student to be admitted to its Graduate School.  The first group of twelve students came together in 1970 into program was little more than a vision of the founders of the Institute.  We created the first curriculum and went across the street to the University of California Berkeley to recruit part-time faculty.

The Wright Institute Graduate School offered a Ph.D in Social-Clinical Psychology.  The idea was to integrate the two fields which did not communicate much to each other.  Graduates who became clinicians would have more awareness of the social contributors to mental health.  Some of us would become, in a sense, clinicians to organizations. 

In a clinical case seminar, a student was presenting his patient to the group and going on about various theoretical models.  The professor stopped him and asked, “What does the patient say the problem is?”

“She says her work is driving her crazy.”

“What does she do?” The class participants leaned forward to hear the answer.

“We haven’t gotten to that yet,” the blushing student therapist said.

Lean Manufacturing Requires Responsive and Reliable Maintenance

Lean operations require maintenance that is responsive and reliable.  When we have isolated operations that are adding value to pieces in a batch that eventually gets passed on to another operation, one machine going down does not present itself as a critical event.

If we have many operations organized in a cell and one piece of equipment breaks down, the entire cell goes down.  We require equipment that does not go down very often – ideally not at all – and when it does go down we need to get it up and running as quickly as possible.  This imposes requirements on the maintenance system. The maintenance system is not limited to the maintenance function.  The system includes standard procedures that are followed by the operators and equipment that does not breakdown and/or can be repaired quickly.

A good way to begin to improve the maintenance system starts with a workshop focused on a single piece of equipment that is or will be critical to a lean, one-piece-at-a-time operation.  The workshop team goes through a process of detailing the machine.

Leadership in the Workplace

I have mentioned that leadership places a crucial role in bringing out the best in people and the organization at the workplace.  We will explore the nature and role of leadership.

I have explored leadership with clients by contrasting it to management.  Management focuses on maintaining the states quo. This is important.  Organizations need to have consistency.  There need to be standard procedures.  Value-adding processes cannot accomplish their purpose without support around people, machines, methods, materials and measurement. These support systems need to be managed.

Leadership is focused on change.  If we want to move the organization to a new way of operating that is lean, world class, and brings out the best in people and systems, we often need to change the way we do things.  Many of my posts so far have been about things that need to change and how they need to be changed.

Go to Gemba

I was facilitating a workshop in a large automobile assembly plant in Great Britain. The factory was a part of a large, western, multinational auto manufacturer. In my group, one of three or four, there were participants from several other parts of Europe and the United States.  This was to be a big learning experience for the entire corporation.

Everyone had gone through a day of lecture and discussion about the principles, concepts and some of the methodologies used in kaizen. Finally, on day two, all of the participants were sent out to the factory to find ways to improve parts of the assembly line. 

Each of the workshop groups was facilitatied by a consultant.  My group was to focus on the installation of the headliners in cars that came down the line.

Every group was given a meeting room.  Our group had about ten people. We gathered in our assigned meeting room and sat around a round table on which were piled a number of drawings of the shop floor and the section in which we would be working, as well as several stacks of printouts with data on throughput time, defect rates, line down-time, and probably several other trends which I do not remember.

Getting these managers out of the meeting room proved to be difficult.  They wanted to “study the data.”  I had to become more and more insistent that we go out to the section of the line we had been assigned to us. We needed to go to gemba (gemba means the “real place,” used in kaizen to refer to the place where value is added) to  Identify waste, which we had learned about the day before. I told the team that after that, we could get away from the noise for a bit, back in the conference room and discuss possible improvements.

Read the Small Print

 This is from gemba panta rei.  You want to become lean?  Better read the fine print:

So here again is my offer:
Lean Brings You Fast Results! Recognition, Pride and Prosperity Can All Be Yours with Lean! Try Lean Management Today!
May require significant changes to leadership behavior. May require dismantling existing reporting structures, organizational boundaries or performance measurement schemes. Positive results due to employee empowerment may be accompanied sense of grief due to perceived loss of power, position or authority. May cause adverse interactions with existing accounting systems, ERP systems and vendor management systems. Results may be delayed due to resistance from key stakeholders. Side effects may not be reversible even if lean management is abandoned. Seeing bottom line results may depend on business growth or restructuring. Actual results may vary. Sustaining of results may require constant effort. Not applicable in industries and processes where waste does not exist. One per customer. Some restrictions apply. Offer void where prohibited by law.

An Important Form to Speak with Data

One of the most useful forms for recording and presenting data, for speaking with data, is the production control form.  I am including a sample here.

This form tells us how a production line, a production cell, or a single production operation is running hour-by-hour.  When used to its greatest advantage, a manager or supervisor can walk through a department and tell very quickly what operations most require attention.  The leaner the operation, the more critical this information can be. The information is recorded each hour by a production operator.

In the example above, the first column divides the day into one hour blocks.  In this case, we have started at 7 a.m. and carried it through 4 p.m.  The information in this column can be modified depending on the start time and the length of the shift.  For example a ten hour shift would have a couple more rows.  The form can have extra rows to be used when the operation is running overtime. A chart for second or third shift would have appropriate time labels in the first column.

Quality Process and Quality Results

How do we assure that our customers receive the highest possible quality in our products?  The first thing that comes to many people’s minds is that we need to have plenty of inspection.  Defective products will get made and we need to catch them before they get to the customer.

Unfortunately, inspection (as well as various kinds of testing) does not catch every defect. No inspection process catches every defect.  Many let 20%, 30% and more escape.  Inspections can also catch products that turn out not to be defective.

In workshops, we demonstrate the unreliability of inspection by having each participant independently count the number of a certain letter (for example, “e”) that can be found in a text. All counters do not come up with the same number. If the letter were a defect, some would not be caught in the inspection process.

Inspection does not add value.  It only catches some of the defective products and leads us to other work that does not add value either, but does add cost.

Takt Time

One of the concepts used by companies that are moving toward leaner operations is takt time.  It is also a concept that is often misunderstood in companies that have had a little exposure to lean processes and have picked up the term.

Takt time is the beat at which we should make a product or component to be in synch with the needs of the customer. The customer may be an internal customer such as a downstream process, or it may be an external customer, a dealer or an end user. Takt is a German word for beat when the subject is music.  The baton used by a band or orchestra leader is called a taktstock.

Let us suppose that a customer of any type needs 900 units, widgets of some kind.  The factory works an 8-hour shift, but a half hour a day goes into breaks and other planned downtime, leaving 7.5 available hours.  Seven and a half hours times 60 minutes, times 60 seconds, equals 27,000 seconds of available time in a shift.  If we divide 27,000 seconds into 900 units, we find that our takt time is 30 seconds per unit.  To be perfectly synchronized with the customers requirements for a day, we need to produce one widget every 30 seconds and each operation in the process should take exactly 30 seconds.

Management Gets More Than It Deserves

In the factories that I visit, I find that management often gets more than it deserves from the production workers.  I remember a woman at a workbench, taking four parts from bins and using a machine to drive a rivet through all four to make a sub-assembly for a circuit breaker. She did this over-and-over, but her rhythm would often be broken because one of the parts had the hole for the rivet off location and therefore would not go together easily with the other three.  She would struggle to make them go together, and sometimes succeed in forcing the rivet through all four parts.  Other times she would eventually set aside the defective component and reach for a replacement, which, all too often, would also be so far out of spec as to be unusable.

Treating People As If They Were Robots

I have consulted to a number of plants with recently acquired robots.  Often the robots didn’t work very well.  In some cases the robots were doing work that made little sense.  In one case, the robot was taking a stamped part from a hanging line and putting it on a belt. It was so unreliable that a worker had to stand by to catch parts that were about to be dropped by the robot. Having the hanging line descend to just above the belt could have removed each part without a robot.

In a factory in Brazil, a robot cell had been installed to weld some parts together. A second cell was in the process of being installed.  Management was very proud of it’s new technology.  They had a five minute video of the robots in the dining room.  The bright orange robotic arms waved through the air and set forth a shower of sparks with each weld. The dramatic video played endlessly, for all lunch breaks on all shifts to see. 

Not a week had gone by since the robots were installed when they didn’t break down and required repair. No one in the plant could do the repair and the technicians who could do the repair were four hours away.  When they arrived it often took an entire shift to get the robots up and running again.